This article is part of the UnderstandingSociety research gateway. Please visit the site, where you will find other useful articles, blogs, and an international social network site on the philosophy of social science, Marxism, and globalization.

* * *

Marxism

Daniel Little, University of Michigan-Dearborn

Marxism
is a family of critiques, theories, and political goals loosely organized
around the theories and criticisms formulated by Karl Marx in the middle of the
nineteenth century.Central to
this body of theory are several key ideas: the view that capitalism embodies a
system of class exploitation; that socialism is a social order in which private
property and exploitation are abolished; and that socialism can be achieved
through revolution.Revolutionary
leaders and theorists, and several generations of social scientists and
historians, have attempted to develop these central ideas into programs of
political action and historical research.The challenges for Marxist political parties fall in two general areas:
how to achieve revolutionary political change (the problem of revolution); and
what the ultimate socialist society ought to look like (the problem of the
creation of socialism).

Marx was an advocate for socialism and for the
ascendant political power of the working class (Newman 2005).He was
one of the early leaders of the International Workingmen’s Association (the
First International), founded in 1864. However, Marx’s economic and political
writings provide very little concrete guidance for the design of a socialist
society.Socialism was to be an
order in which exploitation and domination were abolished; it was to establish
an end to the dominion of private property; it was to create an environment of
democratic self-determination for the proletariat.Marx’s own definition of socialism might have included these
elements: collective ownership of the means of production, a centralized
socialist party, political power in the hands of the proletariat, and the view
that socialist reform will require the power of a socialist state.Marx also emphasized human freedom and
“true democracy”—elements that could have been incorporated into
non-authoritarian forms of democratic socialism.

Much of the political platform of twentieth-century
Marxism took shape following the death of Marx through a handful of more
authoritarian theories, including especially those of Lenin, Stalin, and
Mao.The most catastrophic
ideological results of twentieth-century Communism bear only a tangential
relationship to Marx’s writings; instead, they bear the imprint of such
revolutionary thinkers as Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, and Mao.Perhaps the most crucial flaw within
twentieth-century communist thought was its authoritarianism: the idea that a revolutionary
state and its vanguard party can take any means necessary in order to bring
about communist outcomes.This
assumption of unlimited political authority for party and state led to massive
violations of human rights within Soviet and Communist regimes: Stalin’s war on
the kulaks, the Moscow show trials, the Gulag, Mao’s Great Leap Forward and its
resulting famine, and the Chinese Cultural Revolution.The dramatic economic failures of
centralized Soviet-style economies derived from a similar impulse: the view
that the state could and should manage the basic institutions and behaviors of
a socialist society (Kornai 1992).

It
is possible to formulate a non-authoritarian conception of socialism based on a
democratic socialist movement and a theory of a democratic socialist
society.Indeed, it is possible to
find support for such conceptions within the writings of Marx himself.The most influential Marxist parties of
the twentieth century took another avenue, however.These parties emphasized the “dictatorship of the
proletariat,” the need for the working class to seize power by force, and the
conviction that the “bourgeoisie” and its allies would not tolerate a peaceful
transformation of the defining property relations of capitalism. The Bolshevik
seizure of political power in the Russian revolution (1917), the failed
Spartacist uprising in Germany in 1918, and the Chinese Communist revolution in
1949 all embodied the assumption that only a disciplined central party,
supported by the masses, would be able to exercise the power necessary to
overthrow the capitalist ruling class; and only a disciplined Communist government
would be capable of enacting the massive social changes required for the
establishment of communist society once in power. The dominant political
ideology of communist parties and states in the twentieth century was
anti-democratic and ruthless in its use of violence against its own
citizens.(One of the few examples
of a socialist regime that willingly submitted itself to popular referendum,
and accepted defeat, was the government of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua in 1990.)

Soviet Communism represented the earliest and most
pervasive ascendancy by a communist party.After the seizure of power in the Russian Revolution, Lenin
and Stalin exercised political power to force the rapid transformation of
Soviet society and economy, and to preserve the power and privilege of the
Communist Party.There was deep
disagreement among the Party’s leadership about the right course for Soviet
Communism.How should the
development of agriculture and industry be balanced?How rapidly should socialist transition be performed?How should the forces of the market and
the state be involved in socialist transition?One school of thought advocated a gradual transformation of
the Soviet economy and system of production, permitting the workings of market
institutions and the emergence of an industrial bourgeoisie that would advance
Soviet industrial capacity.The
other school was ideologically opposed to permitting a propertied class to
acquire power, and advocated a state-directed and more rapid transition to
socialism.The New Economic Policy
(NEP) of 1921 embodied the former strategy, and it was decisively rejected by
1928.From that point forward,
Stalin demonstrated his intention of using the power of the state to force
social changes that would propel the Soviet system into its communist
future.Stalin’s determination to
defeat “counter-revolutionary kulaks” during the period of collectivization of
agriculture brought about the deaths by starvation of several million rural people
in the Ukraine, as a deliberate act of policy (Viola 2005).The
doctrine of “socialism in one country” led the Soviet-dominated Communist
International to sacrifice other socialist parties (for example, during the
Spanish Civil War) in favor of the interests of the Soviet system.Stalin’s internal political and
ideological struggles within the party led him to pursue a murderous campaign
against other Communist leaders and ordinary people, resulting in show trials,
summary executions, and the consignment of millions of people to remote labor
camps.(See (Smith 2002) for a good summary of these events.)

China’s
Communist Revolution was guided by Mao T’se Tung from its early mobilization in
the 1920s, through civil war and anti-Japanese war in the 1930s and 1940s, to
successful seizure of power in 1949 by the Chinese Communist Party and the Red
Army.Mao’s Marxism was strongly
influenced by Soviet ideology, but also incorporated the perspective of the
role of the peasantry in revolution.Classical Marxism placed the proletariat at center stage as the
revolutionary class; but Mao’s urban proletariat strategy was destroyed in 1927
when the Republican army under Chiang Kai-Shek massacred the Shanghai Communist
Party organization;.This
precipitated the Long March and Mao’s regrouping around an ultimately
successful peasant-based strategy for revolution.China’s communist leaders too faced fateful policy choices:
whether and how to implement “social ownership” of agriculture and industry,
how to achieve rapid industrialization and modernization, how to create the
political conditions necessary to sustain Chinese socialism and socialist
identity among the Chinese population, and how to confront the capitalist
world.China’s history since 1949
has pivoted around these issues: the Great Leap Forward (1957), in which China
underwent rapid collectivization of agriculture, and an ensuing famine that
resulted in tens of millions of deaths; the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), in
which Red Guards throughout the country persecuted and punished teachers,
officials, and others for political purity; the reform of agriculture towards
the Family Responsibility system in the 1980s, resulting in a surge of
productivity in the farm economy; and the rapid economic growth of the 1990s
into the first part of the twenty-first century.Developments since 1980 reveal a more pragmatic and
market-oriented approach towards China’s development on the part of CCP
leadership.At the same time, the
Chinese government’s crackdown on the democracy movement in 1990 at Tiananmen
Square demonstrated the Party’s determination to maintain control of China’s
political system.

Anti-capitalist
politics of the early twentieth century were influenced by several strands of
activism and theory that were independent of Marx’s thought, and these strands
found expression in the solutions and platforms of Marxist political parties
and movements.Anarchist thinkers
as Bakunin and Kropotkin put forward the radical view that all forms of state
power were inherently evil.Anarchism and syndicalism had significant influence on radical labor
unions in Europe and North America.Revisionist socialists such as Edouard Bernstein argued that revolution
by force was not a feasible path to socialism and advocated instead for gradual
change from within capitalism.Democratic thinkers emphasized the ability of groups of people to govern
themselves, and to press their states to undertake radical reforms of current
conditions.The British Labour
Party and the main European social democratic parties fall within the tradition
of democratic socialism in opposition to Marxism-Leninism.European socialist parties in the
twentieth century affiliated within the loose political organizations of the
Second International (1889-1916), the International Working Union of Socialist
Parties, and the Socialist International (Miliband 1982).

The
twentieth century witnessed several important new developments within the
intellectual architecture of Marxism. Western Marxism attempted to extrapolate
Marx’s ideas in new ways, extending treatment of issues having to do with
humanism, dialectics, history, and democracy.Critical theory was an important intellectual elaboration of
some of Marx’s philosophical ideas, in the hands of such thinkers as Adorno,
Horkheimer, Gadamer, and Habermas (Geuss 1981; Wellmer 1971).In the
1960s Western Marxism developed a distinctive political standpoint on the
issues of the day under the banner of “The New Left”: economic inequality
within capitalist countries, inequalities within a colonialized world, and
struggles for independence by countries in the developing world.Partially shaped by a growing
awareness of Stalin’s crimes in the 1940s and 1950s, Western Marxists developed
the strand of democratic socialism into a full intellectual and political
program.Particularly important
were contributions by Perry Anderson, E. P. Thompson, Ralph Miliband, and the New
Left Review.This body of thought retained the
critical perspective of classical Marxism; it gave greater focus to the world
historical importance of imperialism and colonialism; and it aligned itself
with the interests of developing countries such as Cuba and India.

Marxism
as a body of research.The
other important dimension of Marxism in the contemporary world is in the area
of knowledge and theory.Marx’s
theory of historical materialism maintains that large historical change
proceeds as a result of dynamic interaction between the forces and relations of
production (roughly, technology and property relations) (Cohen 1978).Marx
identifies the economic structure of society (the forces and relations of
production) as the key factor that constrains and impels historical
transformation across large historical epochs (the slave mode of production,
feudalism, capitalism).And he
regards other institutions, including institutions of politics and culture, as
part of the superstructure of society.These “superstructural” institutions are social arrangements that serve
to support and stabilize the development of the economic structure.Another important element of the
framework of historical materialism is the theory of class conflict as an
engine of historical change.The
central conflict in every society, according to Marx, is the economic conflict
between owners of property and property-less: masters and slaves, lords and
serfs, and capitalists and proletarians.Marx also offers a theory of ideology and mystification: the view that
the ideas and beliefs that people have in a class society are themselves a
material product of specific social institutions, and are distorted in ways
that serve the interests of the dominant classes.

Materialism implies that the economic structure of
society is fundamental to its historical dynamics.How does this theory work in relation to modern
society?Marx advanced a
multi-stranded analysis of the capitalist mode of production in his most
extensive work, Capital.This account was intended to be
rigorous and scientific (Little 1986), (Rosdolsky 1977).Marx hoped to succeed in penetrating below the surface appearances of
the English economy of the nineteenth century, to discover some “laws of
motion” and institutional mechanisms that would explain its historical
behavior.There are several
independent strands of this analysis: a social-institutional account of the
specific property relations (capital and wage labor) that defined the material
and institutional context of capitalist development; a sociological description
of some of the characteristics of the industrial workplace and the industrial
city; a historical account of the transformations of traditional rural society
that had created the foundation for the emergence of this dynamic system; and a
mathematical analysis of the sources and transformation of value and surplus
value within this economy.The
mathematical theory based on the labor theory of value has not stood the test
of time well; whereas the more sociological and institutional core of the
framework continues to shed light on how a modern private-property economy
functions.

There
is no single answer to the question, “What is the Marxist approach to social
science?”Instead, Marxist social
inquiry in the twentieth century represents a chorus of many voices and
insights, many of which are inconsistent with others.Rather than representing a coherent research community
defined by a central paradigm and commitment to specific methodological and
theoretical premises, Marxist social science in the twentieth century has had a
great deal of variety and diversity of perspectives.There is a wide range of thinkers whose work falls within
the general category of Marxian social science and history: E. P. Thompson,
Louis Althusser, Jürgen Habermas, Gerald Cohen, Robert Brenner, Nicos
Poulantzas, Perry Anderson, Ralph Miliband, Nikolai Bukharin, Georg Lukàcs,
Antonio Gramsci, or Michel Foucault.All these authors have made a contribution to Marxist social science;
but in no way do these contributions add up to a single, coherent and focused
methodology for the social sciences.Instead, there are numerous instances of substantive and methodological
writings, from a variety of traditions, that have provided moments of insight
and locations for possible future research.

The
twenty-first century. Where do
Marx’s ideas stand in the early part of the twenty-first century?Several areas of limitation in Marx’s
social theories have come under scrutiny by theorists and social critics late
in the twentieth century.(1)
Feminist and cultural critics have argued that Marx’s thought is too
economistic and exclusively focused on issues of class—thereby ignoring
other forms of oppression and domination that exist in modern society,
including those based on gender, race, or ethnicity.(2) “Green” socialists have criticized Marx’s theory of
capitalist development and socialism on the ground that it is deeply
pro-growth, in ways that are sometimes said to be at odds with environmental
sustainability.(3) Democratic
socialists have criticized Marx’s rhetoric of class politics on the ground that
it gives too little validity to the demands of democracy; they have advocated
for a much deeper embodiment of the importance of collective self-determination
within socialist theory and practice.(4) Marx’s critique of capitalist society emphasizes economic features
to the neglect of cultural or ideological forms of domination.Theorists who consider the social role
of communications media argue (reminiscent of Gramsci’s writings) that the
softer forms of oppression and domination that are associated with television,
the internet, and the instruments of public opinion are at least as profound in
the contemporary world as the more visible forms of political and economic
domination that Marx emphasized.Here the writings of Stuart Hall (Hall 1980, 1997) and Raymond Williams (Williams 1974, 1977) have been particularly influential.

Notwithstanding these areas of limitation in Marx’s
vision, the most central critical theory within Marxism is the demand for human
emancipation from forms of exploitation, domination, and alienation that
interfere with full, free human development.And these ideas give ample scope for twenty-first century
debates and progress.

Smith, S. A.
2002. The Russian Revolution : a very short introduction, Very short introductions ; 63. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press.

Viola, Lynne.
2005. The war against the peasantry, 1927-1930 : the tragedy of the Soviet
countryside, Annals of Communism.
Tragedy of the Soviet countryside, 1927-1939.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.